Many decades ago Martin Heidegger wrote "Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht."
(Science does not think). Many years ago Norbert Weiner suggested that
"every instrument in the repertoire of the scientific instrument maker is a
possible sense organ." Many months ago, Marvin Minsky remarked "Culture is
just bad science." Several weeks ago the subway was plastered the glaring
yellow and black platitudes like "Scientists say we use 10% of our brain
cells -- that's way too much." Several weeks ago Robert Pittman (CEO of AOL)
said

"What is and will continue to drive this industry is simplicity, not
complexity." This descent, from metaphysics into marketing, strains against
the trajectory of culture. Engulfed in tidal waves of innovation, it's easy
to comprehend how deeply the ideologies of technology affect the
increasingly uneasy sense of being in the arbitrary end of a century (no
less a millennium) propelled by an almost irresistible urge to link
processes and systems.

Indeed, the "triumphs" of rationality that have extended and/or penetrated
the "boundaries" of the matter, light, biology, the senses, the body,
consciousness, or the imagination, stand as stark reminders that much work
needs to be done to insure that technoscience's grip on the performativity
and reception are not mistaken as unquestionably "rational" or as the
groundwork for an algorithmic social epistemology. Yet the disturbing
signifiers of the assimilation of systems-think emerge from sources as
broad as one can imagine. "In being digital," writes Nicholas Negroponte,
"I am me." Ok, hardly more than a ridiculous cartesianism couched in
Mcluhanesque iridescence, but not much more than Mark Pesce's "At some
point in the recent past - I would place it sometime in 1993 but certainly
no later than mid-1994, the noosphere began a irreversible process of
self-organization. The first of its emergent properties was none other than
the World Wide Web, for it first needed to make itself comprehensible -
that is, indexible - to itself. " But it is this boundary, between dopey
electronic ontology and sweeping ersatz immutability that characterizes so
much of the discourse of electronic culture.

And while virtual philosophizing and artificial embodiment of the system of
technology continues, a storm rages between the fields of cultural studies
and the sciences. The so-called "science wars," the "flight from science
and reason" (as is so well documented in the book of the same title edited
by Gross and Levitt), articulates a further sense of crisis dividing the
border between disciplines as a kind of cyber-modernity, a retrenchment in
which a deeply troubling hierarchy is sustained by almost cultish arrogance
against a perceived failure of expertise.

It is against this backdrop that the history and significance of
representation must stand. Intricately woven into the fabric of modern
culture, the image, the text, the sound, have crossed from modernity into
postmodernity with impunity. Over and under theorized, deconstructed,
politicized, psychoanalyzed, digitized, or even virtualized, the pervasive
salience of representation saturates the cultures of media and computing.
Often outdistancing the metaphors of linguistic, semiotic or scientific
theories, the experience of representation is, in many ways, compounded by
technology.

Indeed, the transformation of culture over the past century has been fueled
by both radical theories of representation and by technological challenges
that have reshaped both its meanings and its methods - for better and
worse! And though there are attempts to find workable ways to approach
immersive, interactive, and networked media, the majority fall into linear,
developmental, or theoretical approaches that either rework literary or
cinematic models (whose effectiveness seems problematic) or that leap into
overindulgent rhizomatic cartographies attempting to reconcile not so much
fragmented as much as disjunctive experience. Rather than situating
distributed cultures in something more than a spatialized electronic
flatland, the botched attempt to "map" non-locality found its adherents
touting slippery notions of haptic navigation that failed to legitimate
much more than disorganization as a form of faux creativity. Nor, it must
be said, do most theories of dispersal and electronic communication realize
that there is a crucial theoretical difference between political,
anecdotal, and essentialized notions of identity as slightly more than
theorized versions of the self. Thus come the cyber-sociologists like
Sherry Turkle, the cyber-philosophers like Michael Heim, the
cyber-self-helpists like Esther Dyson, or the cyber-theologicians like
Pierre Levy. But in the end an approach to the implications of electronic
media cannot be sustained against the flaccid writing of cultural theory
without a critical assessment of media and its histories. The demand to
rethink theories of reception will necessarily require some serious work
concerning the dynamic relationships between philosophy and experience,
cultural theory and social politics, and cognition and technology. A
history of the reciprocity between technology and representation surely
forms the core of any contemporary discourse of media art, simulation, the
cybersphere, or cyborg-identity.

The "revolution" generated by the shift from analogue to digital media has
not come with a unified aesthetic theory. Rather, the accumulating effects
of electronic media has transformed and dispersed many of our assumptions
about the making of art and its relationship with communication,
technology, media, and distribution. Over the past decade, a range of works
have matured to the point where some serious re-evaluations are necessary.
Computer animation, digital video/sound/imaging, electronic books,
hypermedia, interactivity, cyberspace-the terms of a new discourse with the
electronic-need to be integrated with a shifting aesthetic discourse
reeling in the aftermath of critical theories of representation and
postmodern experience. The merging of technology and art raises some key
questions concerning the way in which experiences will be articulated.
Encompassing literature, cinema, entertainment, and the arts, technology
has become the driving force accelerating the emergence of what we might
call telesthetics.

It is this situation, in which information, computation, networked
exchanges, and a formidable change in the idea of creativity are bound
together more formally than at any other time in history, that a statement
concerned with the role of art, the autonomy of the artist, the
responsibility of corporate culture and sponsorship seems most
pertinent-indeed pivotal to sustaining an art increasingly dispersed and
technologized. Nothing is so crucial as to mobilize artists to claim a
stake in the long, long history of the relationship between history,
representation, and technology. It is just a hard fact that at every point
in the development of media technologies, from the illuminated manuscript
and Gutenberg revolution, from the photographic image to the cinematic
experiments of the late 19th century to the use of computer graphics and
networks, that artists have either been central figures in their creation
or vital figures in their implementation in the not so marginal world of
the image, the text, the sound or, most importantly, in the expression of
the meanings made possible through the use of technology.

Like it or not, the most cogent use of the media are made not by its
consumers but by its practicioners. To deny this is to lead the way
backward into the vacuities of the television industries who failed to open
their technologies to the extended and spectuative imaginations of artists,
filmakers, and a generation not willing to cut and paste banal concepts of
theatre into a 5 inch black and white screens. This kind of mistake must be
countered not just by the artists, but by the emerging industries as well.
It comes, sadly, as little surprise that the trajectory of the web is
increasingly driven by netcast thinking but rationalized by faltering ideas
of push and, even worse, broadcast ideology. If you're making media that
needs to be pushed onto peoples screens, you're making media that is either
unwanted, unnecessary, or that has nothing to do with consensus.

Suffice it to say that the shift towards public access has fundamentally
challenged a vast array of cultural practices and initiated the formation
of a communicative network that often seems to verge on a kind of anarchy.
Indeed, the technological imperative of western representation has found
its newest metaphor in the not illogical bond between netcast media and
democratic capitalism. This, along with decisive alterations in the fields
of graphics, image processing, and animation have fueled what is
undoubtedly the deepest transformation in the epistemology of western
culture.

The conflation of the looming finale to the milennium and the endless
crescendo of technologies, anxieties, and excesses of the past decade (let
alone the past century), has opened the floodgates of everything from
calculated rumination to desparate illusion, from neo-utopian theology to
rhizomatic universality. Surely the seductions of cyber-culture, the
emerging electronic crisis of dispersion, disavowal, the disappearance of
the public sphere, the disembodiment of the self, are already contained in
a deeply regulated system in which consensus, representation, and politics
are happily abandoned in favor of tele-presence and fallacies of ubiquity.

"Over and under theorized, deconstructed,
politicized, psychoanalyzed, digitized, or even virtualized, the pervasive
salience of representation saturates the cultures of media and computing."

Reflex is an on-going series of reflections about the still nascent - yet
persuasively poised - discourses of electronic media.